Like all Human-Based (Humanist) Religions, this one too will fail miserably when confronted with robust, monotheistic religions that have actually made this world more livable. They always look like their winning up until the moment they lose.

The sad thing about the article is that it actually seems to appreciate the “religiosity” of environmentalism, even as it recognizes the dangers. Every human being should be interested in keeping the earth clean and healthy. No one should be stupid enough to believe Pope Gore and his merry band of Malthusian regulators have any interest in that goal. They want control – for the sole purpose of political power, along with a way to enrich their greedy friends.

Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, which will be celebrated this year, according to the Earth Day Network, by more than a billion people in 190 countries. When Earth Day started in 1970 few people would have expected it to become a globally observed religious holiday with its own Ten Commandments, including “use less water,” “save electricity,” “reduce, reuse, recycle,” and “spread the word.” The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency wants people everywhere to “commit to action” in defense of the Earth.

America’s leading environmental historian, William Cronon of the University of Wisconsin, calls environmentalism a new religion because it offers “a complex series of moral imperatives for ethical action, and judges human conduct accordingly.”

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When environmental religion seeks a return to an earlier primitive and natural existence, it is embracing utopian dreams that easily can pose a danger to man and earth alike.

“Far from parroting the ‘settled science’ canard, Der Spiegel points to many ‘open questions’ of the science, and says ‘anyone who speaks with leading climatologists today will discover how many questions remain open. The media, politicians and even scientists often talk about changes to the weather with a certainty that does not in fact exist.’ The authors are even willing to raise the ultimate heretical question: ‘Will the situation on the planet truly spin out of control if the average global temperature increases by more than two degrees Celsius?’

For a more pungent appreciation of the Der Spiegel article, read the Daily Telegraph’s James Delingpole. Sample: “When the Germans say Auf widersehen AGW [anthropogenic global warming], it really is time for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice.”

Days after the state Air Resources Board touted the economic benefits of curbing greenhouse gas emissions, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger advised his climate bureaucracy to slow down the rush to impose carbon dioxide cap-and-trade regulations.

Facing growing public opposition and a well-financed ballot initiative to suspend the governor’s signature Global Warming Solutions Act, which mostly takes effect in January 2012, Mr. Schwarzenegger last week wrote to the air board, asking it to consider a less-costly approach to restricting greenhouse gas emissions.

“climate bureaucracy”

That was the goal all along. A cadre of useless toadies governing our lives.

The Wall Street Journal started writing Op-Eds in the 80s that started to make the point that Environmentalism, as practiced by the intransigent ideologues of the left, looked more like a religion than a science (or even a political movement).

Now, with the faked science behind anthropic global warming collapsing, the environmentalists are calling for their first “High Priest.” It’s delicious to see this actually happen.

It’s an exceptionally inconvenient truth. Only one American in three believes that human beings are responsible for climate change: a polling result 10% down on where opinion rested the year before. Worse, the number of Americans who believe that climate change is a hoax or a scientific conspiracy – not doubting, just damned blank certain – has doubled since 2008. Add in those who assert that the changes, if any, are of “no significant concern”, and you’ve got 30% of the US denying, scoffing and just walking on by.

Are the issues clearer, the people more committed, here in Britain? Call for the latest evidence from Ipsos Mori – and find that the proportion of UK adults who believe that global warming is “definitely” a reality has plummeted from 44% to 31% in the last 12 months. Figures like these, on both sides of the Atlantic, are getting more sceptical week by week. The real change of electoral climate is that fewer and fewer voters pay any heed to scientists and politicians.

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None of it has a ring of renewed confidence. And the plain fact is that we surely need a prophet, not yet another committee. We need one passionate, persuasive scientist who can connect and convince – not because he preaches apocalypse in gory detail, but in simple, overwhelming terms. We need to be taught to believe by a true believer in a world where belief is the fatal, missing ingredient.

Indeed, we need a False Prophet, so that government can become more powerful and corrupt energy companies and investment banks can make a false profit.

Copenhagen was a flop. Congress’s cap-and-trade bill is stalled. The EPA has delayed its climate rules. If you think this means American business is escaping the threat of carbon restraints, think again.

Most of the climate debate focuses on Washington. This misses a more clever and committed force—environmental groups that impose their agenda on companies via pressure, legal threat and sympathetic regulators. A textbook example has been quietly unfolding in the insurance sector. The question is whether governors will stand by to let green activists effectively regulate their businesses.

Since the beginning of the climate debate, environmental lobbies such as Ceres (a coalition of activists and investors that pressures companies to go green) have expressed particular interest in insurers. Rather than nitpick every company to adopt climate-change policies, these organizations realized it would be more efficient to target a gatekeeper. Everybody needs insurance. If insurers could be bludgeoned into requiring policyholders adopt carbon-mitigation practices as a requirement for insurance, the activists would have imposed their will widely and quickly.

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Yet under the direction of members such as Wisconsin Insurance Commissioner Sean Dilweg and Pennsylvania Commissioner Joel Ario—both climate crusaders—the task force turned itself into a national climate regulator. In particular, in unveiled its “Climate Risk Disclosure Survey,” a document insurers must complete and make public. This survey was not put forward for legislative approval, but rather presented as something state commissioners must issue unilaterally.

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When I called the industry association CEO Chuck Chamness to ask him about this fight, he expressed the general frustration: “We are a good, green industry. What we don’t believe is that our industry should be made into an environmental traffic cop. If there is a need to change business behavior, go directly to the industry in question and regulate it. Don’t use us as leverage.”

Some states have already caught on to this end run around governors and legislatures. Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels was the first to object, directing his insurance department to refrain from administering the survey. Officials in Mississippi and Missouri have followed suit; Rhode Island says the survey won’t be mandatory.

Al “Village Idiot” Gore went on another rant yesterday, bloviating on about ‘global warming,’ even as the false science behind his giant rent-seeking scheme was collapsing around him.

In those rare moments where I’m NOT convinced that Al Gore is a complete idiot, I’m convinced that he’s engaged in a criminal enterprise to enrich himself. Either way, he should be imprisoned or institutionalized.

* Data for vital ‘hockey stick graph’ has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before – but NOT due to man-made changes

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

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This has been known all along by some of these folks, and I’m hoping there will some indictments, but I doubt it. There are people who should do prison time for promoting what they knew was a lie. Al Gore would do. He’s always wanted to be a religious figure. Let’s nail him up.

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

“Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
G.K. Chesterton

I wear the label ‘anthropic global warming denier’ with pride. All it takes is a bit of education in science (PV=nRT, earth science, evaporation) to know right off the bat that AGW is nonsense.

We all need to become educated enough to ignore the politicized “experts.”

Scientists, you are fallible. Get off the pedestal and join the common herd

So scientists are human after all. They are no different from bankers, politicians, lawyers, estate agents and perhaps even journalists. They cheat. They make mistakes. They suppress truth and suggest falsity, especially when a cheque or a plane ticket is on offer. As for self-criticism, that is for you, not me.

I am just ready to believe that the antics of the climate change scientists, revealed in this week’s Guardian and elsewhere, have no impact on the facts of global warming. But then I must rely on those same scientists to say so. The Yamal-12 larches may be dodgy, the hockey stick limp and the Amazon stats subject to re-evaluation. The date of 2035 for a Himalayan apocalypse may have been a misprint for 2350 and 40,000 comments didn’t spot it. But so what, they all say? The world is coming to an end because we are scientists and, like Nostradamus, we know.

What any layman must find alarming is the paranoia and exclusivity of the climate change community. The preparation of the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was apparently like that of a party manifesto. Data was suppressed and criticism ignored. The IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, dismissed sceptics as adherents of “voodoo science”. Dark hints were made of commercial interest and Holocaust denial.

Now barely a week passes without another of the “thousands and thousands of papers” Pachauri calls in evidence having its peer-review credentials questioned. Their authors may plead that the evidence remains strong and theirs is no more than what lawyers call “noble cause corruption”. Anyone reading the University of East Anglia emails might conclude they would say that, wouldn’t they. Yet Pachauri this week issued a Blairite refusal of all regrets for the chaos into which his sloppiness has plunged his organisation.

Over on his blog at Foreign Policy, the always interesting and engaging political scientist Daniel Drezner raises some important questions about science and politics. Drezner looks at the interaction between populist critics of the science consensus and the guardians of that consensus — specifically at the debate between those who think that vaccinations may promote or cause autism and those (the overwhelming majority of scientists who’ve studied the issue) who think the link is totally bogus. As with the science on climate change I generally assume the main body of scientists are more reliable than their critics unless something very much out of the ordinary is going on.

Dan is surprised and disturbed that on issues like vaccination and climate change these controversies keep erupting. Not being a political scientist I’m in no position to give Dan a fully fleshed out theory, but in a seat-of-the-pants way I do have some ideas.

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When a scientific question is of no interest to the general public — are the greater and lesser spotted skinks members the same species or of two different ones, for example — then scientists are left to settle this among themselves and nobody much is going to question the results of normal scientific procedures. But when science has broader public implications — for example, that cigarettes cause cancer or that every child in the country should be vaccinated against a certain disease — then its findings are going to be scrutinized and argued over in a political context and scientists can expect to have their findings and their methods assailed by all kinds of people whose interests are affected one way or another by their results.

The global warming movement as we have known it is dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping for a ‘politically binding’ agreement to be agreed that would set the stage for the rapid adoption of the legally binding treaty. After the failure of the summit to agree to even that much, the movement went into a rapid decline.

The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.

After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all. This latest story in the London Times is yet another shocker; the IPCC’s claims that the rainforests were going to disappear as a result of global warming are as bogus and fraudulent as its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It seems as if a scare story could grab a headline, the IPCC simply didn’t care about whether it was reality-based.

I get a kick out of lefties calling themselves “reality-based.” Like the typical arch-liberal isn’t as, or more, intolerant than the most angry conservative activist.

The video is of appearance on WPWR’s (Channel 50) “Perspective” program a few months ago. You may be interested in the other 3 guests, as they make the conventional case for dumping more money into a failed education system. If not, my stint starts at the 11:22 mark.